"Three different space probes found the chemical signature of water all over the moon's surface, surprising the scientists who at first doubted the unexpected measurement until it was confirmed independently and repeatedly."

There are two more papers, one by Sunshine et al from Deep Impact, and very short one by Roger Clark from Cassini. All find the same 3-micron feature indicating the presence of H20 or OH, but not surprisingly all have slightly different takes on the significance (though I should note Clark is the 3rd author on the Pieters paper).

Suspect that this will all prove to be of minerological rather than practical interest after the dust settles; it really ain't a lot of water. The possiblity of endogenous origin via solar wind interaction with the soil is fascinating, though.

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A few will take this knowledge and use this power of a dream realized as a force for change, an impetus for further discovery to make less ancient dreams real.

I can only find ISS data from Cassini for the earth flyby - nothing from any other instrument (using http://starbrite.jpl.nasa.gov/ ) so working on the assumption that this is VIMS or CIRS data -then yup - it's not been in the PDS.

I'm finding it hard to get excited about this. We're talking about something two to three times, possibly 30 times drier, than dry concrete - and even then - if I'm not misreading stuff, just in the top few mm of the regolith is this 'damp' (BBC's choice of word there)

So you might get a few tens of tons of water out of ploughing through an entire square km of surface. I'm struggling to imagine that as being useful for, err, anything.

It may well be that this surface smattering of H+O is all there is to the water on the moon story (given the none too positive results from radar mapping of the moons poles) - so I'm going to stick my neck out and predict a very dry LCROSS event.

It must be VIMS data.I could be very wrong, but from the few articles on this I've seen this means that the dark craters get more water input than thought, so there could be a lot more there (??). The press conference will address some of these things I'm sure. I find it hard to judge what they exactly saw where.

It is VIMS data, and it is in the PDS. One problem is that the Clark paper seems to have given the wrong date for the data he shows -- he said August 19, it was August 18. Do a search here: http://pds-imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/search/search.html for VIMS data on August 18, 1999 and toward the bottom of the results page you'll see the lunar stuff. An example browse image is attached. It's fairly low resolution. I'm looking for anyone who can turn this stuff into a pretty natural color view.

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